Warning: This story contains the name and images of a deceased Indigenous person.
Mark Haines’ siblings have spent every day of the last 37 years desperately missing their beloved older brother.
An inquest re-examining the 17-year-old’s death has given his siblings Lorna and Ron Haines very little comfort.
“After 37 years they still don’t feel like they have answers for what happened to Mark,” National Justice Project lawyer Karina Hawtrey told reporters outside the NSW Coroners Court in Sydney on Friday.
Lorna Haines looked to the sky and began to weep as her lawyer described the depths of the family’s torment.
“They want to know the truth about what happened to him, how he ended up on those tracks in Tamworth,” Hawtrey said.
Heavy rain was falling before dawn on January 16, when a train crew spotted Mr Haines’ body lying in the middle of the tracks.
A folded blanket or towel was under his head, with cardboard boxes surrounding him.
Police found a stolen white Torana next to the rail line, which appeared to have crashed and rolled.
An initial police investigation ruled Mark lay on the tracks either deliberately or in a dazed state after the car crash, something his family has never believed.
A coroner handed down an open finding after an inquest in 1988 and 1989.
Mark’s uncle Don Craigie has long pursued rumours that several Tamworth locals had something to do with his nephew’s death or knew more about it.
Weeks of hearings have only agitated those theories, as many witnesses pointed towards other people, were unable to recall key details or denied any involvement.
Craigie said investigators failed to take the family’s suspicions of foul play seriously and police racism hindered any progress in the case.
“That train would still be there if it was a white boy,” Craigie told the inquest on Friday.
“They would have turned that train engine over.”
A senior police officer, Chief Superintendent Alan Donnelly, openly dismissed him when they spoke at a Tamworth betting shop, Craigie said.
“He said to me ‘Don, you never know what a 17-year-old boy would do, you never know what a 17-year-old Aboriginal boy would do’,” he said.
Matthew Varley, the barrister representing NSW Police, showed Craigie a series of newspaper articles in which investigators appealed for more information in the years after Mark’s death.
Police also interviewed several people over the following decade, pursuing leads Craigie gave them, according to documents before the inquest.
But Craigie said police have treated deaths of non-Indigenous people very differently.
“I’ve seen a few deaths around Tamworth and they’ve pulled out all the stops,” Craigie said.
“And then there was others they did not pay too much attention to.
“We want to know how our boy died.”
The inquest, which opened in April 2024, was due to conclude, but further hearings have been scheduled before Deputy State Coroner Harriet Grahame.
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